The Battle For Facebook

An hour later: "I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even 10 p.m. and it's a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive."

At 11:09 p.m., invention was in full swing: "Yea, it's on. I'm not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can't really ever be sure with farm animals . . .), but I like the idea of comparing two people together."

Zuckerberg hacked into the night, breaking into the private user data of each of Harvard's residences and blogging proudly about his exploits every step of the way. The site was an instant hit. That first night, students across campus were e?mailing one another about Facemash. More than 450 signed up, logging 22,000 page views. Within hours, school officials tracked down Zuckerberg and shut off his Web access. Later, in a hearing before Harvard's administrators, he was accused of violating student privacy and downloading school property without permission.

The notoriety turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to Zuckerberg. After he escaped with a warning, he went back to his dorm, opened some champagne and celebrated with his roommates. His reputation on campus as a renegade programmer was cemented. Amid all the high-performing Harvard students, Zuckerberg finally had an identity. And he had also learned an invaluable lesson. "People," he summarized later in a deposition, "are more voyeuristic than what I would have thought."

Zuckerberg wasn't the only student at Harvard exploring the Web's potential for bringing people together. All over campus, students were thinking up ways to use this new tool to make online the personal connections that seemed to elude them in real life. "Networking is a time-honored practice at Harvard, going back to FDR," says Lawrence Summers. "It was waiting to happen. It was a wave of the next Internet thing and a group of very talented, social people. All innovators are great adapters to social need."

Ten months before Zuckerberg launched Facemash, a Harvard junior named Divya Narendra had come up with the idea of creating a social network aimed at college students. The son of a doctor, Narendra grew up in Bayside, New York. He had the face of a Bollywood matinee idol and a mind for mathematics: He got a near-perfect score on the SAT. Narendra was as ambitious as any Harvard kid but felt like he wasn't part of the social stream. "I — and my friends, who were in the same dorm — had the feeling that there were too many barriers and a lack of time for students at Harvard to do social networking," he would recall. It was nerdspeak for feeling left out.

Narendra went to two of his dormmates, identical twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and told them he had an idea for an online community for Harvard students, with access granted only to those with a college e-mail address. The twins instantly recognized the idea's potential. Unlike Narendra and Zuckerberg, they were popular jocks: tall, brawny, blond and chiseled, they rowed on Harvard's crew team and competed internationally. Their father, Howard Winklevoss, was a wealthy financial consultant who had nurtured their athletic abilities. After the twins had shown promise with a coach at the Saugatuck Rowing Club in Connecticut, Dad paid for a 15,000-square-foot nautical-themed boathouse and founded a company, RowAmerica, to support his sons.

Throughout 2003, Narendra and the twins worked on the site, hiring several fellow students to help them code it. But by that fall, the site still wasn't finished. Then, in November, the entrepreneurs, who'd heard about the rise and fall of Zuckerberg's Facemash, decided to contact the programming prodigy and catch some of his computing heat.

On the phone, Narendra told Zuckerberg the site — called the Harvard Connection — would have two sections: "dating" and "connecting." Students could post photos of themselves, enter personal information and search for links. Narendra and the twins wanted Zuckerberg to do about 10 hours of programming; in return, they claim they offered him a piece of the company. That month, Zuckerberg met with the partners, and he agreed to work on the site.

Zuckerberg later claimed that he had no faith in the ability of his partners to pull the project off. "My most socially inept friends at the school had a better idea of what would attract people to a Website than these guys," he scoffed in a deposition. But in his e-mails at the time, Zuckerberg was conciliatory to the partners. "I have most of the coding done," he assured them in November. "It seems like everything is working." Over the next two months, he kept making lame excuses for putting them off — "I forgot to bring my charger home with me for Thanksgiving" — but his tone was cheery, and he promised them that things shouldn't take much longer. Zuckerberg later admitted that he did only a little work on the site in December and none in January.

As the weeks dragged on, the Harvard Connection team started to get anxious. Every time they tried to meet with Zuckerberg, he postponed, blaming his busy schedule. Cameron Winklevoss pressured him to finish the job: "hey mark, drop me a line when you get a chance," he wrote on January 6th. Two days later, Zuckerberg replied with an apology: "I'm completely swamped with work this week. I have three programming projects and a final paper due by Monday." Finally, on January 14th, Zuckerberg met with the twins and Narendra. Despite his previous assurances that all the code for the site was nearly ready, he informed them that they should get another programmer. The Harvard Connection guys were stunned. What happened to all the work they'd been promised?